Letters - July 2

Hood River really has a treat this week thanks to Mt Hood Railroad. Thomas the Tank Engine is in Hood River this week, along with some of his friends and Sir Topham Hatt at the Mt. Hood Railroad Station from the Island of Sodor, as seen on the TV program Sunday mornings at 8:30 a.m. on OPB.

Rides are for sale every hour and food and fun as well as additional videos are shown on the half hour. Saturday had crowds of children and their parents taking pictures etc., all around and the fun will last all week, through July 4.

Paul Nevin

Hood River

Dying for oil

It is very little comfort to those of us who opposed the Iraq War from the beginning that the majority of Americans are beginning to realize what utter insanity it is for us to be over there at all. There has never been any credible evidence that Saddam Hussein had ties with al-Qaida, and time has proven what many of us suspected: There are and were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

There was, however, and continues to be oil, huge quantities of oil that has made companies like Halliburton and individuals like our vice-president richer than most of us can imagine. The war also served Bush well through much of his first term, and helped push him into a second, despite an utter lack of leadership and success in every domestic arena.

This is what American men and women are dying for: Not democracy and freedom, as the president likes to pretend, but wealth and power. Thousands of children have been killed and even more orphaned as a result of this administration’s heedless war — a war, it might be added, that people and communities like ours are funding — at the cost of schools, infrastructure development and help to those who most need it.

Let your representatives know that you don’t support this administration’s war. Tell them to demand a precise and realistic exit plan, before thousands more innocent people are killed.